Mazes & Gardens

Wonderful mazes and amazing gardens

Maze fans have many options for getting lost at three huge maze gardens, with each one offering their own challenges and lots of fun. Garden lovers tend to run out of adjectives on the Mornington Peninsula.

It’s usually after they’ve roamed through hills of lavender, inhaled the perfumes of vast rose beds or taken a springtime stroll. If they’re keen vegetable gardeners, they’ll often be clutching packets of heritage seeds, or have an armful of organically grown seedlings. Diehard native garden enthusiasts say they could just about take up residence at the Australian garden in Cranbourne. And lovers are never short of a romantic garden walk.

If you’re travelling with kids, there is a fantasyland of mazes, gardens, art and adventure where fun is high on the agenda, and there’s thrilling tube sliding and tree surfing where you can ride on a 10-metre high zip line. You’ll also find Australia’s oldest hedge maze, a circular maze of heavenly perfumed rose bushes, and famed fragrant and abundant lavender bushes which bloom all year There are vast rose gardens around a magnificent Victorian mansion, where 75,000 rose bushes have been planted, as well as one of the few Victorian gardens listed in the exclusive Oxford Companion to the Garden that is rich with heritage vegetable gardens, towering trees, dry gardens and floral borders.

There are many garden scents on the Mornington Peninsula. There’s the tang of eucalyptus in the peaceful bush, the rich perfume of thousands of roses in formal gardens and the heady scents of herbs in lush gardens around our vineyard restaurants. Our parks and gardens are a visual feast too, with blossom-filled walks in spring, huge shady trees in summer, fiery colours in autumn and little cafés where the coffee and welcome warm you in winter. Gardens also become an art form with award-winning sculpture collections, while others with huge mazes are very family friendly.

Set across 15 glorious hectares, the Australian Garden at Cranbourne won a Gold Medal in the 2011 Chelsea Flower Show and is an inspiring display of Australian flora, landscapes, art and architecture which follows the journey of water from the arid inland landscapes of central Australia along dry river beds and down powerful rivers to the coastal fringes of the continent.